The Hanford nuclear site, located on the Columbia River in Washington state, was built as part of the Manhattan Project to process plutonium for nuclear weapons. Operated until the end of the Cold War, the decades of weapons production has left Hanford as the most contaminated nuclear site in the US, with a long history of cover-ups about the leaking high-level radioactive waste. In a project that is currently 10-years behind schedule, the DOE is attempting to build a vitrification plant at Hanford to process and neutralize the massive amounts of radioactive waste left behind by the creation of nuclear bombs. Today, nuclear policy expert Robert Alvarez joins Arnie to discuss the ongoing environmental damage to the Hanford site.

Listen

Transcript

English

KH: It is Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013 and this is the Energy Education podcast. Today we are talking about a nuclear leak of a different kind. The Hanford site in Washington State for decades was a nuclear production complex. It was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and manufactured bomb-grade plutonium that was used in the bombing of Nagasaki. The Hanford site eventually grew to include 9 nuclear reactors and 5 chemical plutonium processing sites. Today, much of the nation's high level nuclear waste from this refining process is still stored on site. Joining us to discuss the condition of these units is Bob Alvarez. Mr. Alvarez is a former Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment. Today, he is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he focuses on nuclear disarmament, environmental and energy policies. Bob, welcome to the show.

BA: Thank you for having me on.

KH: And Arnie, welcome to the show.

AG: Hey, Glad to be here with an old friend.

KH: I was just going to say, old friends, with Arnie Gundersen and Bob Alvarez. Tell me about that.

AG: Yes, I met Bob in 1993 when my whistleblower complaints made it to a congressional hearing. The chair of the hearing was Senator John Glenn and it was the Government Oversight Committee. Bob was on the staff for that committee. I can remember the very first time meeting him in the halls of Congress. So we go back 20 years.

KH: Bob, what are your memories of meeting Arnie for the first time?

BA: Among the things I was responsible for was oversight investigations of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the federal nuclear program. It was in the course of sort of looking into the problems that Arnie had raised on the commercial side that I got involved and got to know Arnie.

KH: So the Hanford site is not a nuclear power plant, but they did used to run 9 reactors for the purpose of producing plutonium for atomic bombs. But this is all old news. So what's new?

BA: They have announced that there have been several tanks now that have been leaking after a period of years where they were not. There is a long history of cover up regarding these tanks. In the late 1980's while working for Senator Glenn on a Government Affairs Committee, we were the first to force the Department, or compel them, to reveal the magnitude of the leaks at the Hanford tanks, which turned out to be over 1,000,000 gallons. Roughly 1/3 of the tanks, more than 1/3 of the tanks at the site had leaked. They mitigated the problem somewhat by what they called removing as much liquid as they can from the tanks, leaving behind salt. But these tanks are not holding up and they are still, now, resuming leakage. They also built a second generation of tanks that are called double shell tanks, that have 2 steel liners, and one of those has already sprung a leak.

KH: So Arnie, can you give us a little bit of history about what went on at Hanford?

AG: The Hanford site dates back to the Manhattan Project. It was designed and built in the early 1940's to make plutonium for nuclear bombs. The site had as many as 9 reactors and the reactors created the plutonium in their fuel. But that is not how you make a bomb. You have got to chemically strip out that plutonium. So the Hanford site had the reactors creating irradiated fuel and then the fuel was chemically stripped of the plutonium to make the bombs.

KH: So the spent fuel was plutonium plus a bunch of other radioisotopes which was then refined.

BA: About 1% of the spent fuel in terms of the reactive content, is plutonium, or actually, by weight. So they took it to what are called chemical separations plants, where they dissolve the spent fuel in nitric acid and then use solvents to extract out the uranium and the plutonium. And then left behind is waste stream which they then mostly poured into these 177 tanks which, these are the wastes that are considered to be high-level radioactive waste.

KH: What is in that waste?

BA: Every element on the periodic chart is in those wastes. The wastes make up about 54 million gallons. They contain about 194 million curies of radioactivity. Somewhere around 1 to 1.5 metric tons of plutonium are sitting in the sludge in these tanks.

AG: So Plan A was when they stripped out the plutonium, that they would just put this liquid gook into tanks. And Plan B was that they would then make better tanks, double-walled tanks. Now Plan C is that they are building a facility out there that is years behind schedule to solidify the contents of these tanks.

BA: That is correct.

AG: But when Plan A was created, there was no plan for ultimately treating this stuff; the goal was to just dump it in the desert.

BA: They really never thought about emptying out the tanks and dealing with these wastes. I mean, these wastes were generated during the war in sort of a big hurry to make the first nuclear weapons. And they scaled up to this rather to these large-scale industrial operations within a year after the first self-sustaining chain reaction took place at the University of Chicago in December of 1942. When they started to separate out the plutonium from the spent fuel, the wastes came out as an acid and so because it was acidic, the only way you could store this stuff would be in stainless steel tanks. Because there was a shortage of stainless steel during World War II, the Dupont Corporation, which was the company hired to build and run the first reactors and reprocessing plants in the world, just made a decision to mix the wastes with lye, sodium hydroxide in water, to neutralize them and put them into carbon steel tanks. They never really thought about what it would mean once they did that in terms of getting that stuff out of there because you greatly increase the volume. It created essentially sludge started forming on the bottom and was giving off tremendous amounts of heat from the radioactive decay causing the bottoms of the tanks to crack out and leak. And so they never really gave much thought to removing these wastes and what it would take, much less rendering it into a form where it could be stable enough to be disposed of geologically for a very long period of time.

AG: So at the Perry plant just last month they found a goldfish in a bucket of water in a main steam line tunnel. If that goldfish had been dropped instead into one of these tanks, what would happen to the goldfish?

BA: It would die instantly. The dose rates coming out from some of the wastes in some of these tanks are on the order of 10,000 R per hour.

AG: And a thousand R will kill you.

BA: Yes.

AG: So this is 10 times lethal in an hour.

KH: So Bob, we have talked a lot about the waste to storage tanks at the Fukushima plant and the radioactive water that they contain. How would you compare the radioactivity of this water to that water?

BA: The radioactivity in the high-level waste tanks at Hanford are far, far more radioactive and contain much higher amounts of radioactivity because these wastes were generated from the actual chemical separation of irradiated spent fuel. The wastes at Fukushima are mostly coming from pouring ocean water over the cores, which remain unstable. And then running that water through banks of filters, a zeolite beds or ion exchange resins, and then pouring whatever they can into these so-called tanks, which I have learned that they are really nothing more than thin-lined underground holes in the ground. So the radioactivity in the wastes that are sort of being used to essentially keep the cores cool at Fukushima is much more dilute than the wastes that are in the high-level waste tanks at Hanford.

AG: So the problem at Hanford is that we have got more than a hundred leaky tanks and it is not like it is in the middle of a desert with nothing nearby. There is groundwater and there is the Columbia River that runs relatively near to these tanks.

BA: That is right. The Columbia River runs through the Hanford site and the tanks are approximately 10-11 miles away. Actually 67 or 69 tanks I believe, have leaked over a million gallons and the wastes have migrated about 200 feet to the groundwater that enters the Columbia River.

AG: So have they picked up radiation in the Columbia River yet?

BA: Not that I am aware of, but they have picked it up in the groundwater that moves it to the Columbia. I mean this is a problem that will stretch out over a long period of time and so we are looking at the risk of the near shore of the Columbia River, the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River which flows through the site perhaps being rendered uninhabitable in less than a thousand years.

KH: And of course like you are saying, this is high-level radioactive waste.

BA: That is right. These are wastes that are specifically designed to go into a deep geologic repository to prevent it's escape into the human environment for tens of thousands of years.

AG: So now the Department of Energy is building a facility on site to attempt to solidify the contents of these tanks. As I understand it there are a couple of problems. One is that every tank has got a different chemistry, so whatever chemical process you figure out to solidify one tank, is not going to work on the next tank. Of course then the other part of it is that all these techniques have never been tried. So we basically have this huge chemical plant out there that is a high-level radioactive waste experiment.

BA: The wastes have been poorly characterized. So you are right, when you do not have a good idea of what the chemical composition of the wastes are, and you are trying to basically mix these wastes into a molten glass form, a very specific type of molten glass, you have to be very careful about the impurities. Otherwise these waste vitrification plants could have quite serious accidents.

KH: So Bob, what makes these wastes such a big deal?

BA: The wastes are also very problematic in terms of just moving around because you have to add water to the waste to pump them out because they are now mostly in a salt form. And once you start to add water back to the waste, the radiation interacts with the water and peels off the hydrogen in a process called radiolysis and you start to generate more hydrogen and explosive gasses. Also the wastes contain gasses that are sort of what they call oxidizers like nitrous oxide which reduces the ignition temperature and makes them more prone for explosions and fires. So throughout the process of removal and moving this stuff through essentially a radio-chemical operation to process it so it can be mixed with molten glass, you have to be concerned at every step of the way about the generation of flammable explosive gasses. So these tanks have had histories of steam explosions, over-pressurization with large quantities of hydrogen in their head spaces, and things like that, which we uncovered over 20 years ago. So the tanks themselves still are safety risks. Having said that, a vitrification plant is not a reactor. It does not have the thick concrete and steel shield that surrounds a reactor vessel as an extra barrier to prevent the escape of radioactivity during an accident. What the vitrification plant has is something like 700 filters with no extra containment while it is handling very large megacurie quantities of . . . millions of curie quantities in batches. So, if you do not remove certain impurities from the wastes such as chromium, aluminum, sulfates, if this stuff gets into the melter, it can cause what are called face separations and if water gets in there then you have a steam explosion and you could have a catastrophic release of radioactivity that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself considers to be just as bad as a severe nuclear reactor accident.

AG: So we are really stuck between a rock and a hard place here. If you leave it in the ground, it is going to rot the tanks and work it's way to the Columbia River, but if you try to vitrify it, which is a technical term meaning you try to change it from this liquid muck into a solid pellet that could then get stored in the ground, if you try to do that, you run the risk of an explosion comparable to a meltdown in a nuclear reactor.

BA: The problem here is one of rushing, trying to simultaneously design and build a first-of-a-kind operation, that has never been proven to work before, with material you do not really understand all that well. There is also a rigidity to decisions about how to proceed here. For example, the type of glass that the United States has decided on for these wastes, what is called porous silica glass, requires a great deal of pre-treatment. As I said, you have to take out these impurities or else you have real big problems down the road.

KH: So is anyone else doing this any differently, I mean is there anything else we might be able to try?

BA: Russia on the other hand, has been vitrifying or has vitrified a very, very large amount of similar wastes using a glass form where you do not have to do a lot of this pre-treatment. It is a sodium phosphate or iron phosphate glass which is very tolerant of impurities. But because it was not invented here, and more specifically they did not think about it at the Hanford site, there is a fierce resistance to looking at alternative technologies.

KH: So Bob, if this project were put in your hands, what would you say we should do?

BA: First of all, we need to recognize that this is the largest most expensive and perhaps most riskiest environmental nuclear project that the United States has undertaken. This project, if you look at it's current official estimated life cycle expenses, is somewhere in the ballpark of a hundred and ten billion dollars. Roughly 20% of that total cost is the capital expense of building the facility. The rest has to do with operation. This facility is going to have to operate rather smoothly for many decades to get these wastes removed and stabilized. It is now being treated almost like a relatively obscure side show, whereas it should be treated as a project of national importance with a great deal of attention. One of the problems here is that there is not a third party safety overseer to this project. When this project was launched on it's second or third iteration in 1996, when I served in the Department of Energy, we had the Nuclear Regulatory Commission come in with the goal of them having to license this facility. They brought in 75 people and brought in a much different culture. I know that there is a lot of concerns and issues about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and it's relationship with the reactor operators. In this case, as they say, the NRC did not have a dog in this hunt. They brought in some of their best people and started to sort of develop a system of regulations that would be light years ahead of what the department does. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates safety through basically standards that are subject to fines and penalties that are developed in a relatively transparent way through the Administrative Procedures Act. They are binding. The Department of Energy for the most part regulates safety through contract clauses that can be changed without any public notice.

KH: So, if I can get this straight, this waste product is actually vitrified with a solid glass ceramic compound meaning it is not exactly put into a vessel, but it is combined with a solid glass or ceramic to make sort of a log, a solid piece of waste, which can then be easily handled by robots. Now there are some studies that show that this might not last for more than a hundred years. Can you talk about that Bob?

BA: I think that the issue of the durability of this glass is theoretical anyway, and that what I am afraid has happened is that a decision was made sometime in the early '70's to sort of pursue this particular technological fix and all thinking stopped. So a lot of the proof is still in the pudding here and has yet to come out. The other problem with what they are trying to do here is that they are trying to reduce the number of glass logs that would go to a repository, because this is a very large volume of waste that has to somehow be dealt with. So their plan is to fractionate the waste, in other words, the waste in the tanks are in 2 basic forms: a soluble form and an insoluble form. The insoluble form is essentially the sludge that sits at the bottom of the tanks and it contains over 90% of the heavy stuff like plutonium, strontium 90 and things like that, and then the liquids or salt cakes which are soluble, sit on top and that stuff contains over 90% of the very, very radioactive stuff, such as cesium 137. Their current plan is to separate out the soluble from the insoluble, somehow pre-treat the soluble material, the salts, and remove all that, as much radioactive cesium as possible and dump that on site in a glass form. And to take the cesium that they are removing from the soluble phase and put it into the waste stream where they are going to be vitrifying mostly the sludge. This is turning out to be a little more complicated than they had thought because it involves a great deal of pre-treatment. But the other big problem, a technological problem or design problem, is that the Department basically decided to go ahead with a design that was initially developed by British Nuclear Fuels. And they used what are called black cells. These are sort of hermetically sealed process rooms where once you seal them up, nobody goes in, there is no way to fix things once you go in, and if something goes wrong, this could literally cripple the whole operation.

KH: So this vitrification process is a 35 year old idea. Can you give me some sense of what the track record of it is?

BA: They have been using this glass form, the first really, or if you want to call it a test bed, was at West Valley, where this involved essentially one tank of high-level wastes. And they have been able to generate glass logs with that. The Savannah River site in South Carolina has been operating a vitrification plant, but it has had big problems in terms of dealing with the 80%-90% of the waste volume in these soluble waste forms and that part of their vitrification plant is about 20-25 years behind schedule and way over budget.

KH: So Bob, is this technology ready for prime time?

BA: I think it is unproven. They claim that it would hold up for these long periods of time. As I said, I think this is still in the realm of speculation. I think the problem here that we are looking at is a very similar problem to what we are looking at with respect to commercial nuclear spent fuel, is that we are putting the waste disposal cart before the safe storage horse. I think we need to start to think about building spare tanks at Hanford and establishing a much more responsible containment strategy for these wastes, given the fact that this technology is taking a very long time and costing a lot of money to even demonstrate it will work. I think that we also need to start to look at alternative technologies that can be demonstrated on a pilot's field. This may take longer, you know, when we made the first nuclear weapons during World War II, we built pilot plants. We did not suddenly scale up from the University of Chicago's first reactor pilots, it was called, and built these giant reactors at Hanford. There were pilot reactors built at Oak Ridge before that, before the larger reactors were built at Hanford. That lesson seems to be lost. There is this rush to build these very large plants with no proven history of success on what you call a design-build basis, which I kind of refer to as the ready, shoot, aim approach to design and safety. There has been so much pressure to stabilize these wastes and not much attention paid to the fact that these tanks that are holding these wastes are decades old. Most of them were constructed during the '40's through the 60's. Over a third of them have leaked and their structural integrity really leaves much to be desired. And by the time we get around to removing the contents of these wastes and ultimately stabilizing them, these tanks could go into a stage of incipient collapse. And so there is sort of a real disconnect here between the matter of safe storage and disposal because there is this rather false assumption which I think people are deluding themselves into thinking is the case, is that somehow disposal of these materials are just around the corner when that is not in any way correct. The other thing I just wanted to mention is that while we are talking about high-level radioactive waste, it is very important to understand that one of the main reasons why we are seeking to dispose of these kinds of wastes in a deep repository, it is not only because of their very highly radioactive properties which tend to last for several hundred years, but also the long-lived radio-toxic dangers of elements like plutonium. The Hanford site during the course of producing all this plutonium, dumped as much as a metric ton of plutonium into the ground. And as best I can tell, the Department has no intention of recovering this plutonium, which at least according to some of their attenuation models indicate that it could render the near shore of the Columbia River uninhabitable in less than 1,000 years. There are multiple challenges at Hanford is what I am saying, the high-level radioactive wastes perhaps the most difficult, risky challenge. But then there is the matter of trying to remove and recover very large amounts of radiotoxic plutonium that eventually will reach the Columbia River.

AG: It seems to me like Congress has not been paying enough attention to this over the years. And now we have got an aggressive senator, Senator Wyden, who is finally pushing Congress to take a look at this. Is there anything our listeners can do to persuade Congress that this is a pretty important problem?

BA: I think that it has to be recognized that this is an issue of national importance. We are talking about protecting one of the largest freshwater streams in the United States, the Columbia River. When I used to work out for the D.O.E. and I had to go out to Hanford quite a bit, I would always ask people, why are you here? And it took awhile for them to understand the reason they are there is to protect that river. And that is a matter of national importance. So I think that if people value the resources of this country beyond their own backyard, then they should start to pay attention to sites like Hanford. The Department of Energy's system of safety regulation is fundamentally broken. The Department is not poised to dispose of approximately a ton of concentrated fissile material in the form of uranium 233 & 235 in a shallow landfill in Nevada because they do not want to spend the money to properly stabilize this stuff for geologic disposal. And I think that if the Department is allowed to continue to move it's goal posts like this, do not be surprised if you see abandonment of high-level radioactive waste tanks at Hanford. Or at what they politely refer to as in-place disposal of large amounts of plutonium in the environment.

KH: I can see why you and Arnie are old friends: neither of you have good news. But I am hoping you will come back on the show in the future and keep us updated as to what is going on at the Hanford site.

BA: I would be happy to.

KH: Thanks for coming on.

BA: Thank you.

KH: Arnie, thanks for coming.

AG: Thanks.

KH: And that about does it for this week's show. Remember, you can catch us back here next week and every week for more on what is happening in the world of nuclear news and more technical nuclear discussion. Also, don't forget to "Like" us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For Fairewinds Energy Education, I'm Kevin. Thanks for listening.